The Hidden Agenda[1]
Please say that you are my sister, so that it will go well with me…and that I may live because of you.[2]
What did Avraham hope would happen, if things would “go well with me?” Rashi says that he hoped that the Egyptians would shower him with gifts. This is hard to fathom. Wasn’t Avraham unusually opposed to accepting freebies? Doesn’t he spurn the smallest gift from the king of Sedom later[3] in the parshah?
If we keep our eyes open to a major pattern in Chumash Bereishis – or allow Chazal to train our vision on what we should see – we can understand the all-important, hidden agenda that explains Avraham’s words.
The pattern is maaseh avos, siman l’banim /the actions of the Avos adumbrate what later happens to their descendants. Chazal[4] tell us that Hashem told Avraham, “Go forth and blaze a trail ahead of your children.” Avraham left a famine in Israel to seek food in Egypt; so did Yaakov’s family. Avraham sought gifts from the Egyptians so that his descendants would also receive gifts on their way out of Egypt. Events in the lives of the Avos took Divine blessings and influences, and made them part of this world. They fixed in place patterns that would be repeated on a much larger scale in the future.
The Zohar[5] widens the scope of this process: Had Paroh not taken Soro, says the Zohar, he would not have been stricken with plagues. These afflictions of Paroh were important, because they were the cause generations later of the Paroh of the Exodus being stricken with awesome makos.
However, it is difficult to see how Avraham’s emigration to Egypt was a trail-blazing accomplishment for his descendants. Avraham is faulted for his move; it is seen as the reason for the gezerah that his descendants would themselves be exiled in Egypt![6] Why would anything good come out of that? We must assume that it was Hashem’s intention all along that the Jewish people spend years in Egyptian exile. Avraham’s “aveirah” was a pretext to make it see that the Egyptian servitude was a just response to some earlier fault. In fact, there was no sin in what Avraham did. His forced stay in Egypt was part of a larger Divine plan for the development and emergence of a Jewish nation.
When Avraham instructs Soro to claim that she was his sister, he says, “Now I have known that you are a woman of beautiful appearance.”[7] The Zohar[8] comments on how, exactly, he knew. “He saw the Shechinah with her.” Because of this, says the Zohar, Avraham never jeopardized his wife’s safety in claiming that she was his sister. The Shechinah would provide all the protection she needed. And the word “sister” was a double-entendre. He was really addressing the Shechinah itself, along the lines of “Proclaim to wisdom, ‘You are my sister.’”[9]
With this line of reasoning, we solve another difficulty. In a similar encounter later on,[10] Avimelech challenges Avraham: Why did you do this to me? Why didn’t you tell us that Soro was your wife, rather than misleading us and identifying her as your sister? Avraham responds that he saw that there was no fear of G-d in his society, and was afraid that they would stop at nothing to hand Avimelech an attractive woman. Including killing him. Why, then, when Paroh asks him a similar question does Avraham offer no explanation?
According to our thinking, the answer is obvious. Avraham could hardly have told Paroh the truth: that Soro’s ordeal was preordained in Shomayim, in order to pave the way for her descendants. Therefore, Avraham said nothing!
- Adapted from Be’er Moshe, Lech Lecha ↑
- Bereishis 12:13 ↑
- Bereishis 14:23 ↑
- Bereishis Rabbah 40:6 ↑
- Zohar 82a ↑
- Zohar, ibid. ↑
- Bereishis 12:11 ↑
- Zohar 82b ↑
- Mishlei 7:4 ↑
- Bereishis 20:11 ↑